Saturday, November 19, 2011

While I have been away from the SABG, I have had a chance toplay a good number of TI3 games with my game buddies from my church. Over the past year we have evolved a few house rules that I thought I would share with y’all. They have worked out quite well and would beinterested in your feedback.· Hidden Carrier Compliment – For just a few dollars (less than $6), I was able to get some small six-compartment boxes. We mark each compartment with a number and also a corresponding carrier (1 – 4) and war sun (5-6). Instead of placing fighters on the board, we place them in the box. This masks the number of fighters that a carrier has aboard. You would be surprised how well this works!! People now see carriers in a whole new way – does it have the full complement of fighters or just one or two…maybe its empty and just a bluff. The rules of the gamewere not changed, just the units on the board. I loved the way this worked out. It also considerably reduces the board clutter.· PDS rule modification – A PDS planetary shieldcan now effect a war sun similar to the way it effect a dreadnought. Basically the PDS will reduce the number ofdice that a unit (dreadnought or war sun) rolls by one during planetarybombardment. So a war sun will roll only2 dice when bombarding a planet with 1 PDS and only 1 dice if the planet hastwo. Why this rule? We just thought that even if a war sun could getpast the PDS, it should still at least be hampered by it.· Double the amount of PoliticalCards: This is only for the second set of strategy cards as these give you morecontrol over the political cards. Basically every time you draw a politicalcard, you take two instead. When you play a political card you will alsodiscard one without playing it. This will give more attractive choices for thepolitical process. We did this because we all agreed that this just gives usmore choices about playing political cards and we are more likely to use thepolitical process. It works well.Before shuffling the objective deck, we photo copy the cards so that theplayers can all see what the cards will be. This gives the players a chance toknow what to work for, but not know when the card will come up

Mark, you never have to push too hard to get a game of this out of me. We have a good pool of players. In fact we may go for another game in the next month or two. I will keep your name in the loop for this one.